Sold for Parts
by Song of Glory Won
Summary: Wherein Martin and Douglas are drift compatible, Arthur is brilliant, Carolyn is in charge, and the J in MJN stand for "jaeger."


**A/N:** _I...don't even know where this came from. I don't remember what prompted the idea. I DO know that when I searched all over the internet for something Cabin Pressure/Pacific Rim related, I came up pretty short. So. Hopefully someone on the planet other than me wanted to see MJN attempt to save the world._

* * *

"This warehouse is filthy," Carolyn sniffs, tugging a little at the hem of her jacket. She has to speak up, over the noises of a hundred men working in wet wood and leather. The hum of engines shake the cement beneath her feet and fine dust settles over everything. It is crowded, it is smelly, it is dirty; it is the last place she expects to find Douglas Richardson.

"This is the last place I expected to find you," she says.

"To be fair," Douglas says slowly, "this is the last place _anyone_ has expected to find himself, I suspect."

Carolyn huffs and flicks sawdust off her dark uniform sleeve. They're getting stares, the sole still people in the milling crowd of a busy workspace full of the most desperate of desperates, building a wall useless against monsters, but Carolyn couldn't care less.

She was fairly certain no one watching had ever been quite desperate enough to wish to track down Douglas Richardson and _ask_ him to take his job back.

"The program needs you," she says.

"Oh come, Carolyn, I'm sure—"

She cuts off his lazy drawl with a swipe of her hand. "Don't play me for the fool, Douglas. You've seen the news—I know you have. I've lost my pilots, and—heaven help me—I need you back."

Douglas raises an eyebrow at her (oh, how she hates that eyebrow!). "My, I had no idea I was so indispensable."

He's playing her, she knows, pushing the right buttons to get her to storm off with a few well-chosen words and a sharpness to her voice. But the PPDC has granted her a piece of the coast of England to defend and she intends to do so, even if it means bullying Douglas Richardson back into a job. "There's no one left, Douglas," she says a little more quietly. "I mean that—no one. I wouldn't be here otherwise. I realize you think I have a heart of stone, but I'm not _that_ cold."

Douglas sighs, and Carolyn knows she's won. She can't help driving it home; "I would ask Herc, but…"

"What, that old man?" Douglas snorts. "He was never half as good as I was—"

"Then come back and prove it." Carolyn straightens her jacket and turns on her heel. "The chopper leaves in fifteen minutes—don't be late!"

The world is ending, Carolyn holds the fate of one small part of it in her hands, and Douglas slides into his seat a full six minutes late.

She smiles and says nothing. She'll get her revenge when Douglas meets his new co-pilot.

* * *

It's not that Martin is a particularly difficult pilot to match. He knows the manual back to front. Carolyn would not put it past him to have memorized the manual. But he's flighty-he gets lost in the drift, he loses track of what he's doing chasing rabbit trails, he panics when the jaeger doesn't react the way he expects it to. He needs a steadying presence, someone to ground him in the swirling semi-reality of the drift.

Douglas does not promise to be that steadying partner. He's got his hands in his pockets, leaning against a wall, smirk on his face, looking down his nose at the red-faced little man in a beat-up pilot's coverall that is trying too hard.

Carolyn sighs.

"Gentlemen," she says smoothly. "I trust you are ready to attempt to be semi-useful to the PPDC?"

Martin straightens in spite of himself. Douglas slouches a little less nonchalantly. "I'm always useful," he says.

"Untrue," Carolyn retorts. "If that were so, you would be in Tokyo, not here." She barrels onward, ignoring Douglas' wince. "Enough chit chat. There are kaiju to fight. A jaeger to maintain. The last pilot geared up will be running maintenance checks with Arthur for the rest of the day."

She doesn't even finish the sentence before they've both disappeared.

* * *

Out of everyone on the planet, Carolyn suspects that Arthur is the only person living truly unaffected by the end of the world.

Well, not completely unaffected. He is, after all, maintaining a jaeger in a large metal warehouse living with his mother and two washout PPDC pilots, but he is still unshadowed in a way no other human seems to be. He does not carry the weight of Carolyn, responsibility on her shoulders. Or the grief of Douglas, who lost his co-pilot in the drift and his wife in the drink he drowned in afterward. Or the guilt of Martin, who was only seven when the kaiju came, who can never quite shake the feeling that something is wrong with him for loving the jaegers, for loving something that was a result of so much disaster.

Arthus is still, in a word, brilliant.

She does wish he would stop experimenting with the rations, though.

* * *

The letters MJN are splashed across the back of the jaeger, dark and defiant against the weathered metal.

"But that's not her name, surely," Douglas drawls. "Three letters only? Such a mecha is worth more than that I would think."

Carolyn bristles, because she painted those three letters on the jaeger when her good for nothing husband abandoned her to defend this forsaken outpost all on her own.

But Martin, wonder of wonders, beats her to an answer. Martin, who appears to loathe Douglas with every fiber of his being. Martin, who can hardly walk a straight line in a jaeger, much less fight off a kaiju.

Martin, who alone understands Carolyn's beat-up jaeger the way no one else has quite managed to.

"Gerti," he says quietly, and the way he says it shuts even Douglas up. "Her name is Gerti."

* * *

"This was a terrible idea," Carolyn mutters, when Martin and Douglas are safely ensconced in the cockpit, unable to hear her doubt.

"Oh don't worry Mum." Arthur bounces a little on his feet. "They'll be great!"

"They fight like cats and dogs." She frowns; that's a little unfair to cats and dogs. "They fight like, like—"

"Like the kaiju and a jaeger!" Arthur finishes eagerly and unhelpfully.

She gives him a stare.

"Don't worry," Arthur says again, and goes back to checking levels or whatever it is he does on his laptop. "They'll be brilliant."

She doesn't argue with him. Arthur talks more than he thinks, he often labors on after the uptake, and he has caught enough wrong ends of enough sticks to build an entire wrong end of a forest, but he has never once been wrong about spotting drift compatible pilots.

The jaeger—Gerti—flickers to life. Carolyn holds her breath as it raises its head, metal scraping, joints old and stiff.

It takes a step, and the ground shakes.

Arthur is not wrong this time, either.

* * *

They are all gathered around a radio, listening to news and music while Arthur fiddles with parts and Martin writes out procedures when the kaiju bursts out of the water far below their warehouse outpost.

In the first show of coordination Carolyn has ever seen Martin and Douglas display, they race for their gear and Gerti. She and Arthur watch as the jaeger shudders, shakes its head. Steps forward. Nearly goes to its knees when it hits the ocean. Rights itself, straightens, meets the kaiju head-on with a right hook that can only be Douglas and a textbook kick that can only be Martin.

Carolyn knows that this kaiju is young and small, and probably already injured; her pilots are, of course, managing to fight it. It does not stop her from gripping the railing next to the viewing screens tight enough to make her fingers ache. She listens to Arthur chatter on the comm, giving helpful advice such as "Oh look out, it's glowing!" and "Brilliant move, chaps!" and "I made coffee which actually has turned out to be a pretty terrible idea because now I'm not sure how to get it to you and anyway it'll be cold by the time you get back and Douglas do you take sugar?"

When the kaiju is dead and Gerti is back in her bay and the pilots—flushed with adrenaline and exhaustion and pure victory—are stripping their gear off, Carolyn feels very close to saying something ridiculous and sentimental that she will very much regret later.

Douglas saves the day.

"Fast food restaurants that sound like kaiju classifications," he says.

* * *

Their part of the coast does not, perhaps, need much defending. It is deserted except for them. The closest village is hardly worth attacking. When the world ends, or when it doesn't, Carolyn suspects they will be the last people to know about it.

But for now the world is still ending, and the Jaeger Program has proved to be many things—a success, a last defense, a final hope. It is many things to many people, but it is not, as Carolyn keeps explaining to Arthur, a family.

She can't help but notice that it feels like one.


End file.
